History and Historiography of Science

Postmodern equivocation

Here’s that Zammito quote, Nice Derangement of Epistemes, pp. 262-263; on Stanley Fish’s reply to Alan Sokal at the height of the science wars:

“Stanley Fish, before he resorted to ad hominem self-righteousness [Zammito does not pull punches], also offered a defense of the postmodernist stance. He wrote: ‘What sociologists of science say is that of course the world is real and independent of our observations but that accounts of the world are produced by observers and are therefore relative to their capacities, education, training, etc. It is not the world or its properties but the vocabularies in whose terms we know them that are socially constructed–fashioned by human beings–which is why our understanding of those properties is continually changing.’ This is a remarkable piece of writing. If, indeed, science studies took the stance that Fish represented, there would be nothing radical whatever about it. That is, in fact, why Fish is unbelievable, for science studies does seek to be radical. Indeed, a careful study of Collins, of Pickering, and above all of Latour–to say nothing of Harding and Haraway–suggests not only that they would repudiate Fish’s intervention but recognize it for what it is–disingenuous rhetoric. There is a characteristic move here, one which features in much postmodernist posturing. Extreme positions are taken; when challenged, authors deny the extremity and affirm they really meant a far more modest posture.”

Zammito is astute here and what he says jibes well with what I’ve seen in my short career in the history of science. It shows the instability of ideas* in the sociology of science, which devolves into one of two states, call them “spin up” and “spin down” to use the idea from physics that “intermediate” quantum states cannot exist.

Spin up is the radical “strong program” that I refer to as a parlor game, which states that science-society relations are understandable without reference to epistemology. The problem is that the stance totally fails to explain historical events, which cannot be understood without reference to the robustness of scientific (or really any) ideas and the incentive to agreement that robustness provides (more on “robustness” later). Hence the need for epistemological “cheats” as I called them yesterday.

Spin down is the banal “science is not context-independent” critique which sets up prior scholarship (and a general “society’s view” often referred to using the pronoun “we”) as a straw man that presumes a naive philosophical (“algorithmic”) viewpoint toward science, that nobody holds (I think we could include even the Wave One’ers here, although Collins and Evans insist on keeping them naive). Spin down informs the majority of professional history of science writing today.

So, by refusing to take any positions between spin up and spin down, sociologists are faced with either being interesting and wrong, or uninteresting and right, and will tend to vacillate between the positions as it suits their interests. However, Zammito goes on: “At least in Collins, Pickering, and Latour we have authors strong enough in their convictions, whatever others think of their claims, to refuse to water them down and escape criticism.”

Notably, all three of these individuals have tried to break out of the constraints of the spin up-spin down duality. Latour with Actor Network Theory, Pickering with the “mangle” (which I want to discuss later), and now Collins and Evans with SEE. I have my reasons for thinking that SEE is actually worth historians’ time.

*I love the term “instability of ideas”; in “Fog of War”, LBJ, in a conversation with Robert McNamara re: Vietnam, quoted a senator saying it.

The sociologists’ game

I’m planning on looking at the Collins-Evans SEE program in a little bit more depth in the future. I just received my copy of Rethinking Expertise, and will delve into it at the next opportunity (things are nuts–hence no blog posts in almost a week!) I think we’re eventually going to have a Q&A with Collins and Evans as part of an effort to improve the blog and expand readership.

For now, I’d like to take apart a line in my previous post about their “Third Wave” which is that they seemed “hamstrung” by not engaging in epistemology. This comment is clearly indicative of the historian/sociologist divide. Sociologists of science take particular pride in performing “symmetrical” analyses–that is their sociological descriptions should apply regardless of epistemology. This way they can comment equally on how scientific knowledge operates in society as well as how knowledge gleaned from reading the cracks in a turtle shell produced by a hot poker operated in Ancient Chinese society (say, by determining whether it was auspicious to plant crops).

This move can come off as sort of like a parlor game: how much can we say about knowledge and society without recourse to philosophy? Rhetorically, it takes scientific knowledge down to the level of turtle shell poking, which has been the cause of much protest, especially since reckless statements have been made (Zammito has a good line on this–I’ll dig it up later). I get the sense that the problems caused have also given rise to this idea of things having a “voice” which is interpreted through attendant “spokesmen”. This is part of the point of a lot of Latour’s work, particularly beginning with Pasteurization of France.

I won’t recap the whole history of SSK here (again, see Zammito); but I find it interesting that sociologists refuse to use philosophical “cheats” to rectify, at least temporarily, the rhetorical absurdities. As an historian, I feel entirely free to investigate social structures and philosophical convictions to see how they inhabit scientific practices, but (I think) that’s because I’m interested in investigating specific historical practices of specific actors; I’m not attempting to explain “scientific practice” in general (at least in long duration trends). In this way, I can at least make a stab at explaining the historical data.

The idea of having to tear science down before we can build it back up sociologically (as Collins and Evans seem to be trying to do) strikes me as inefficient. The insights achieved by SSK have been valuable, and we can write better histories because of it, but the gap between the initiation of Wave Two and the initiation of Wave Three (should it even take off), has meant spending Moses-like time spans in the academic wilderness with a deconstructed scientific enterprise that obviously has merit. If the refusal to use epistemological cheats really is just a parlor game, we should ask if it was worth it.

Scientists and Historians, Take 3

Refining my thoughts about the relationship between scientists and historians, I think I can now make my case a bit more succinctly. The main question is: what counts as history? For historians, almost everything now counts as history: culture, epistemology, practice, physical objects, and so forth. And, going back to the historical record, historians can see that scientists have had high level (if sometimes poorly articulated) discussions about the relationship between institutions, practices, and knowledge. This is one reason why Peter Galison’s Image and Logic is one of my favorite history of science books; it’s not because of the trading zones and pidgins and creoles; it’s because in Chapters 2 through 8, while he doesn’t constrain himself to “actor’s categories”, he does let the actors work the issues out amongst themselves rather than describe the “tensions inherent in their work” or something like that. I think it’s the fact that these actors do work these issues out and develop new socio-epistemological cultures that gives the book its fairly unique optimistic tone. One of Galison’s main stylistic points is that he refuses to bemoan whatever trend there might currently be that threatens to consume science. He is not the analyst-as-enlightened-external-observer.

The unfortunate bit is that scientists have not tended to see these discussions as the really historically interesting things that they do. It’s just the petty details of institution-building, or whatever. For them, it’s still primarily about big discoveries and Nobel Prizes or hagiographies telling the “human side of the story” or whatever. And now, here we are, finally, with a pretty good grip on these issues, and we’ve gone and scared all those deep thinking scientists off. It’d make the writing of the history of 21st century science a lot easier if they had a strong interest in publicizing their debates about these deeper issues and articulating them better. So, that’s, I think, what I was trying to get at yesterday.

Where did all the scientists go?

A bedtime story.

Once upon a time, most historians of scientists were Scientists who took an interest in history. They had a close relationship to the Philosophers. In fact, the origins of the field are usually traced to Harvard President James B. Conant’s desire to find out How Science Works. They did some pretty good work, but took too many things to be Obvious that were actually quite Problematic. So, some Analysts became involved, and made some Notable Contributions. Soon the Analysts only wanted to talk amongst themselves, and eventually the Science Wars broke out, and this made the Scientists go away, and thus the Analysts had the history of science all to themselves. The End.

I think most everyone now agrees that the science wars were absurd; but I haven’t heard much talk of rebuilding from the rubble. Frankly, I miss the scientists (yes, of course, there are plenty who are still around, but we’re painting in broad strokes here). Sure, they weren’t the best historians in the world, and most of them weren’t willing to follow the rest of us into some really interesting questions, but there are a lot of deep thinkers out there among their ranks. Here at the AIP, we are actually closer to them than to academic science studies. But much of the talk seems to be “heritage this” and “preservation that” (commensurate with the fact that the History Center is basically a co-entity with the fabulous Niels Bohr Library and Archives). Going back to square one, there’s a reason why there was so much enthusiasm for the history of science after World War II, and it wasn’t all about justifying public expenditure. I’ll compact the way I see it into a pithy sentence: history makes us more aware of the assumptions underlying practices (whether in history or today).

I think we need to put more effort into putting out the kinds of studies that scientists actually find professionally interesting. Personally, I know Dave Kaiser’s work on Feynman diagrams, which is read in the physics community, and also managed to receive the HSS Pfizer Prize. Hopefully if we do good enough work and practice good enough outreach, we might see some more interesting discussions about practice in the scientific communities as well. Then maybe the philosophers can come in from the cold, too. That’s not really my field, though. I just don’t want scientists to think of what I do as an antiquarian enterprise.

New Title

OK, how about “Waves in the Ether”? It seems a little corny, but it is appropriate for both the history of science and its internet medium. “Ether Wave Propaganda” is also a contender, but I’m not sure the pun on “propagation” is apparent enough, and, even if it is apparent, whether it’s not too cutesy to use a pun. Anyway, I’ll put it up there on a trial basis to see how the aesthetics are.

Edit: You know what? I kind of like the propaganda title better. Let’s see how that works.

Wave Three in the Sociological SEE

By far the most interesting thing cropping up in my semi-annual journal review will not be featured in the History Center newsletter, because it is not directly concerned with physics. It is the recent Studies in History and Philosophy of Science dedicated to Harry Collins, Robert Evans, and Mike Gorman’s attempt to create “Wave Three” in the sociology of science, which Collins calls Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE) (originally outlined in a 2002 article by Collins and Evans in Social Studies of Science). To recap, Wave One is the “science is a special form of knowledge” associated with Merton et al.; Wave Two is the “no it isn’t” SSK trend that I’ve been rambling about here as a central motivator of the case study literature found in the history journals.

Wave Three is designed to correct the obvious and longstanding shortcomings in Wave Two by focusing on the social dynamics of “expertise” rather than “truth-production”–that is, roughly, trying to explain not only how knowledge is validated by society, but the mechanisms by which it actually becomes useful. Before descending into the usual sociological hell of illustrative case examples, labyrinthine jargon, and funny diagrams (here, things like the “Periodic Table of Expertises”), the three of them come up with some useful ideas, particularly one about “interactional expertise”, which they seem to view as a generalization of the Galisonian “trading zone”.

Effectively, interactional expertise deals with knowledge exchange between groups who overlap, whose knowledge is relevant to each other’s activities, but who are not part of the same expert community. It also puts knowledge in the framework of decision-making rather than knowledge-production, which has some interesting possibilities I could talk about later. (It also suggests they may simply be covering ground that Herbert Simon covered in Administrative Behavior 60 years ago during the supposed heyday of Wave One).

I think the Wave Three’ers are a little hamstrung by their seeming unwillingness to discuss epistemology (a remnant of the old antagonisms with the philosophers?), but it still strikes me as salubrious given the historiographical trends produced by Wave Two. (Conveniently, it also meshes quite well with some ideas appearing in my dissertation and forthcoming book, but that’s a topic for a time when the book is much nearer to the printing press!)

Edgerton’s Justification Criterion

David Edgerton has a new short article on including the history of chemistry in the history of twentieth century science and technology, which can be found here. It’s pretty much in-line with Edgerton’s usual arguments, but in light of the discussion I’ve been having with myself here, concerning justification criteria, I’d like to point out just how strange Edgerton’s primary justification criterion is in our profession: economic importance. I recommend taking a look because it’s a very quick, concise look at the way he views the history of science and technology.

Edgerton’s criterion has a lot to do with his longstanding effort to show that a 20th century understanding of “science” cannot be separated from the fact that most scientists were involved in the production of technology (but he also claims that this isn’t a new phenomenon). By concentrating on what we view as the crucial problems of “knowledge” we miss out on most of the history of science and its relationship to society. He would argue that we don’t have historiographical gaps to fill–we have an entire cosmos of science that we haven’t even made an effort to understand, because it doesn’t accord to our accepted notions of what is historiographically significant in the history of sci/tech.

Edit: Edgerton sends me along the important caveat that his idea of justification can include many things beyond economic significance, and not just things that can be evaluated quantitatively. This is true, and you’ll find arguments for cultural and political significance as well as economic significance in his work.

I’ve always been most impressed by his frequent arguments for economic significance, though, because so few scholars ever even think to address it.

Us vs. Them: a vacuous revolution?

With the last lecture of History 174 before spring break behind me, it’s time to attend to that semi-annual task here at the AIP: putting together a list of physics-related articles to appear in the past half year for the History Center newsletter. The opportunities for blog posts abound! Aside from the obvious questions about the current state of the history of physics (which I’ll argue about another time), one thing that’s popped out at me is a question I’ve been thinking about, and that is the fallout from the “science wars”. Here’s a crackpot theory: did the science wars serve to make science studies circle the wagons and start seeing the world in terms of a united “us” versus “them”?

Who are “they”? Well, anyone who commits grave historiographical errors, particularly scientist-writers. This occurs to me reading Matt Stanley’s review of three recent Einstein books in the Winter 2008 issue of the recently-renamed Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (formerly “…in the Physical and Biological Sciences”). Einstein is an incessant font of pop history, which provides trained historians with many opportunities for valid criticism. Here, Stanley criticizes attributions of Einstein’s revolutionary effect on science to Einstein’s revolutionary attitude (among other sins, such as citing the AIP website!).

But, I wonder if this isn’t like picking on the weak kid on the playground. Do we cut ourselves off from internal improvements by attacking outsiders? Is this the reason why we still think it constitutes good scholarship to give the lie to naive positions? Have the science wars morphed into a “1984”-style perpetual war against an unseen enemy? Will it continue until all the reductivist running dogs are eliminated once and for all? Shouldn’t we just let the pop historians do their thing, while we do ours? I mean, it’s not as though articles in HSNS are going to change pop historians’ bad habits.

Matt’s a great historian, and I don’t think he does this, but it still seems to me that attacking weak foes in our professional past or on the outside of the profession will not sharpen our abilities as much as attacking the much stronger scholars within the profession.

This idea is basically the same notion I was working with when discussing the justification for the production of a continual steam of narrow case studies.

Still thinking about blog titles…

I realize this blog has a lame title, but I’ve been waiting for a good title to find me. Preparing my lecture on natural history from Buffon to Darwin, I’m thinking about “Discourse on Style” after Buffon’s discussion of the same name. Too obscure? Is it appropriate to what we’re trying to do here? We’ll see if it still seems like a good idea later on.

Online Debate for Fun

In case you all are wondering what happened to Jenny: A) she’s been in French archives, and we all know what that’s like, and B) she’s trying to organize an online debate featuring some of her Paris colleagues, probably in Google chat, concerning: “some topics in history – methodologies in history, the Enlightenment and philosophical inquiry, British vs. French schools of thought, etc.” So, you know, petty details stuff! Stay tuned for details on date and time. Main points summarized here, but since it’s online all are welcome to take part.